Some defrocked pedophile priests live unrestricted in the Lehigh Valley

Defrocked priest Joseph H. Kean speaks to a reporter from the door of his Lehigh Township home on Monday. A state grand jury report lists six allegations of sexual abuse against Kean. (Harry Fisher / THE MORNING CALL)

Defrocked Catholic priest Joseph H. Kean lives in a ranch home he inherited from his parents overlooking a valley in Lehigh Township. He keeps a replica of Jesus, Mary and Joseph in his front yard and, when asked if he is innocent of sexually abusing children, did not answer the question.

Defrocked priest Joseph A. Rock owns two condos in Bethlehem and a home on Allentown’s South Mountain. His car bears a sticker that warns, “I’m Catholic and I Vote.”

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Defrocked priest Thomas J. Bender has a manufactured home on a ramshackle dead-end street in Lower Macungie Township. Unlike most of the 301 clergymen named in a scathing grand jury report, he was convicted of preying upon children, served time in prison for it and is now required to register as a sex offender.

The Catholic Church has sought to cast the sexual abuse of minors as a thing of the past, a dark era for the church that is unrecognizable from its policies today. But men such as Kean, Rock and Bender — all identified as offenders in a state grand jury report this month — are a flesh-and-blood reminder that the past is still present and many of the priests the church helped shield from justice remain alive, albeit in their waning years.

Tim Lennon, president of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, said abusive priests, however they exited the ministry, “continue to be a threat to the community, and the church washes its hands.”

The Morning Call visited three priests this week and tried contacting others named by the grand jury or the Allentown Diocese. Most do not have listed phone numbers, and messages left at listings for five were not returned.

The grand jury’s report was released last week and offered a withering account of decades of abuse by priests in six Pennsylvania dioceses, including Allentown, and the cover-up of it by church leaders.

Two of the nine sexual abuse allegations the grand jury report lists against defrocked priest Joseph A. Rock came when he was chaplain of Holy Family Manor nursing home in Bethlehem and accused of abusing two elderly men. (FILE PHOTO / THE MORNING CALL)

With Rock, the former priest who owns three properties in Lehigh County, the grand jury report highlighted repeated complaints that began in 1986 when three boys came forward to the church, and continued through 2001, when the state Department of Public Welfare investigated whether Rock sexually abused two elderly patients while serving as chaplain of Holy Family Manor nursing home in Bethlehem.

A friend of Rock’s since the 1970s, Bill Peoples said he does not dispute the allegations against Rock, 77. But Peoples said they don’t address the entirety of his friend’s character.

“Is it a sickness? Is it a disease? What is it?” said Peoples, who on Monday was visiting a property Rock owns in Allentown. “But the side of Joe I know, believe me, it is exemplary. But the side of Joe they talk about, I don’t know.”

Peoples cast his friend as an erudite, articulate, hard-working man who still tries to help others, including by driving ailing nuns to doctors’ appointments.

“Mr. Rock is unquestionably in 90 percent of his life one of the finest human beings you will meet,” Peoples, 77, of Allentown, said. “But as I was saying to someone yesterday, he obviously has a problem or had a problem.”

It’s a problem that the grand jury found the church long covered up. In 1986, Rock was placed on “sick leave” and sent to a treatment center in New Mexico, which offered a “bleak picture” of his prognosis, the grand jury wrote. One staff member called Rock “one of the worst cases he ever encountered,” the grand jury said.

In 1987, then-Bishop Thomas Welsh limited Rock’s ministry to Holy Family Manor and an adjacent retirement facility for priests, the grand jury said. In 2000, the diocese paid a $305,000 settlement to a man who said Rock sexually abused him as a minor. Others came forward in 2003 and 2007, the grand jury said.

The grand jury cited an interview the church officials conducted with Rock after the 2003 complaint. During it, Rock said he could not remember the allegation, but admitted it could have happened “since the incident is in keeping with the way he acted with other victims,” the grand jury wrote.

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Rock retired in 2001 following the complaints involving the elderly patients, the grand jury said. He was later dismissed from the priesthood.

In a response to written questions, Allentown Diocese spokesman Matt Kerr said the diocese is unaware of Rock’s driving nuns to appointments, and said religious orders make their own decisions about with whom their sisters interact.

Kerr said Rock, Kean and Bender were all defrocked, which bans them from formal roles in the church. Those priests receive no financial support from the diocese unless they are vested in the pension plan, he said.

“If they are vested, the diocese, like any employer, is required to make pension payments,” Kerr said.

Kerr said he did not know how many of the priests named by the grand jury were vested, and did not answer a question of whether Rock, Kean or Bender receive pensions.

Rock did not respond to notes left at his two Bethlehem condos requesting comment. While speaking with a reporter and a photographer, Peoples phoned Rock, asking him if he wanted to comment. Rock could be heard saying no, and that he’d seen the media come to his door that day but decided not to answer.

The Rev. Michael Lawrence, pictured in 1975, was accused of molesting two boys. He was allowed to retire with benefits in 2002 and died in 2015. (TMC)

In 2014, the diocese took a different approach in the case of the Rev. Michael Lawrence, deciding not to defrock him despite two allegations and Lawrence’s own admission to molesting a 12-year-old boy at a Reading parish in 1982.

When confronted by his superior at the time, Lawrence said: “Please help me. I sexually molested a young boy.”

According to the grand jury report, Lawrence saw Rock as a possible “source of support.”

After meeting with then-Allentown Bishop Thomas Welsh in 1987, Lawrence wrote in a letter: “I find myself in a very dangerous position. The deep sense of frustration and anger have led me to act-out sexually in the past and if my present situation continues it becomes a possibility again.”

Lawrence then made reference to Rock, “and opined that perhaps they could be a source of support for one another.”

After treatment in the 1982 incident, Lawrence continued in ministry until 2002, when the diocese allowed him to retire with benefits, the grand jury report notes. In 2009, when a second allegation, from the late 1980s, surfaced, his status didn’t change.

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Then-Allentown Bishop John O. Barres notified the Vatican in a December 2014 letter “that he would not seek the removal of Lawrence from the priesthood,” the grand jury report said. “He recommended that he remain in retired status.”

A day after the report was released, Barres, now head of the Diocese of Rockville Centre, N.Y., took issue with that account, saying Lawrence was housed in a “secure facility” until his death in 2015 and that the grand jury report missed that point.

A response prepared by his office reads, “As the letter shows, Bishop Barres concluded that it was better for Lawrence to continue in this ‘supervised way of life’ at the secure facility rather than to have him re-enter society.”

Barres, who led the Allentown Diocese from 2009-2016, did not respond to The Morning Call’s questions about where Lawrence was housed and what made the facility secure.

Kean’s case

According to the grand jury, when Kean retired from the priesthood in 2002 and began collecting a pension and health, life and car insurance benefits, he did so after years of complaints that he was molesting children.

The grand jury said the church received its first complaint in 1992. It involved a boy who was allegedly abused for several years starting when he was 12 years old. At the time, Kean was pastor of SS Peter and Paul in Tower City in Schuylkill County and later a church by the same name in Lehighton.

Other sexual abuse complaints were lodged against Kean in 1993, 1999, 2002 and two in 2005, the grand jury said.

At his Lehigh Township home, the 81-year-old Kean was listening to talk radio and cleaning the house when a Morning Call reporter came to the door Monday.

Kean acknowledged he is accused of sexually abusing many boys, but said that “this was not the time” to speak publicly.

Asked if he was innocent, Kean paused and did not answer the question, saying, “I’m not supposed to be talking to anybody, especially reporters from The Morning Call.”

The grand jury said that in 1993, Kean admitted to church officials he abused one of the boys who came forward. He “apologized for any embarrassment he may have caused,” and said he also abused a friend of that boy, the grand jury said.

Bender’s case

Bender, now 84, was twice convicted of crimes against children. In 1988, he received seven years’ probation after admitting molesting a Pottsville boy, yearslong abuse that investigators said began while Bender was serving in Schuylkill County as a high school teacher and chaplain and continued after he became pastor of Most Blessed Sacrament parish in Bally, Berks County.

In 2006, Bender was arrested in Levittown, N.Y., while traveling to meet what he believed was a 14-year-old boy for sex. He was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison and a lifetime of probation, and was released Dec. 5, 2014, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons. He remains listed on New York’s sex offender registry.

“I have no comment,” Bender told a reporter who knocked on the door of his Lower Macungie home.

Asked if he was sure, Bender responded, “Yes.”

Defrocked priest Thomas Bender, who would be convicted twice of sexuallyabusing children, is pictured reporting to a preliminary hearing in 1988. (FILE PHOTO / THE MORNING CALL)

According to the grand jury, the Allentown Diocese was aware that Bender was abusing children as early as 1972, when he was caught with his pants off in a car with a student from Nativity High School in Pottsville.

The grand jury said the church put Bender on a leave of absence in 1987, the same year in which the public learned of the Pottsville molestation allegations of which Bender was later convicted.

But Bender was permitted to remain on leave even after he pleaded guilty, and in 2002 he applied for and began receiving retirement benefits, the grand jury found.

The grand jury said Bender was dismissed from priesthood only in May 2005, and was continuing to collect retirement benefits when he was arrested in New York.

In an op-ed last week, Allentown Bishop Alfred Schlert asked for forgiveness for the church, while calling the scandal something he inherited when he took the post in 2017.

“And so my message to everyone affected by this horrendous part of our past is this: Please offer us another opportunity to regain your trust,” Schlert wrote. “Please be open to understanding that while our church at one time was a model of what not to do, today we are an example of how to deal effectively with this terrible societal problem.

“In the Diocese of Allentown, victims and survivors are heard and cared for, perpetrators are held accountable, and children are protected,” he continued.

Two days after that op-ed was printed, Lehigh County District Attorney Jim Martin announced charges of indecent exposure and corruption of a minor against the Rev. Kevin Lonergan, a 30-year-old Allentown Diocese priest. Martin said Schlert brought the allegation to him as soon as he became aware of it. Lonergan is accused of inappropriately touching a 17-year-old girl and sending nude photos of himself to her.

Both Martin and the diocese said Schlert wanted to immediately make public the diocese’s action but, on Martin’s request, waited for the criminal investigation to run its course.

Northampton County District Attorney John Morganelli said last month that the diocese also acted swiftly in reporting an allegation against Monsignor Francis Nave, who was accused in June of talking a teen he was counseling online into sex acts. Morganelli’s office is still reviewing that allegation.

Two Allentown priests named in the grand jury report — Monsignor Thomas Benestad and the Rev. Francis Fromholzer — filed responses to the grand jury report, denying the allegations against them.

Redacted from that document are the names of more than a dozen who claim it will unconstitutionally damage their reputations, a legal issue that is unresolved. Attached to the report are roughly 470 pages of responses — from the dioceses that were investigated, to individual priests who were named. In those filings, some asserted their innocence.

In appearances before the grand jury, other former priests admitted they were abusers, according to the panel.

Dismissed priest James Gaffney, who served in the Allentown Diocese from 1987 to 2002, told the grand jury he had sexual contact with at least one girl, and said it was possible he had sexual contact with others, though he “blamed a faulty memory for lack of specifics.”